id
int64 | transcript
string | label
int64 |
|---|---|---|
5,675 |
in barcelona on las for some film festival i did the hollywood sign going and coming made a building out of it and they built it i flew in one night and took this picture but they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me and then more metal and some chain link in santa monica a little shopping center and this is a laser laboratory at the university of iowa in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back it's the support labs which by some coincidence required no windows and the shape fit perfectly i just joined the points
| 0 |
5,676 |
and the shape fit perfectly i just joined the points in the curved part there's all the mechanical equipment that solid wall behind it is a pipe chase a pipe canyon and so it was an opportunity that i seized because i didn't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form it gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it this is a small house somewhere they've been building it so long i don't remember where it is it's in the west valley and we started with the stream and built the house along the stream dammed it up to make a lake
| 0 |
5,677 |
we ended up having to make it a sculpture because the dilemma was how do you build a building that doesn't look like the language is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub divided etc etc you've got the idea and so we finally ended up making it
| 0 |
5,678 |
you've got the idea and so we finally ended up making it these people are art collectors and we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side and the building is very sculptural as you walk around it it's made of metal and the brown stuff is fin ply it's that formed lumber from finland we used it at loyola on the chapel and it didn't work i keep trying to make it work in this case we learned how to detail it
| 0 |
5,680 |
and what that illustrates is that decisions are the key things that support our perceptual bubble it keeps it alive without decisions you cannot see you cannot think you cannot feel and you may think that anesthetics work by sending you into some deep sleep or by blocking your receptors so that you don't feel pain but in fact most anesthetics don't work that way what they do is they introduce a noise into the brain so that the neurons cannot understand each other they are confused and you cannot make a decision so while you're trying to make up your mind what the doctor the surgeon is doing while he's hacking away at your body he's long gone he's at home having tea
| 1 |
5,681 |
our mission is to build a detailed realistic computer model of the human brain and we've done in the past four years a proof of concept on a small part of the rodent brain and with this proof of concept we are now scaling the project up to reach the human brain why are we doing this there are three important reasons the first is it's essential for us to understand the human brain if we do want to get along in society and i think that it is a key step in evolution the second reason is we cannot keep doing animal experimentation forever and we have to embody all our data and all our knowledge into a working model
| 0 |
5,682 |
two years ago at ted i think i've come to this conclusion i think i may have been suffering from a strange delusion i think that i may have believed unconsciously then that i was kind of a business hero i had this company that i'd spent years building it's called future it was a magazine publishing company it had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars a number i didn't really understand a magazine i'd recently launched called business was fatter than a telephone directory busy pumping hot air into the bubble
| 1 |
5,685 |
even something as important to us as happiness you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions and there's nowhere that i've discovered other than ted where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions and so it's the profound thing that richard talks about to understand anything you just need to understand the little bits a little bit about everything that surrounds it and so gradually over these three days you start off kind of trying to figure out why am i listening to all this irrelevant stuff and at the end of the four days your brain is humming and you feel energized alive and excited and it's because all these different bits have been put together it's the total brain experience we're going to it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage
| 1 |
5,686 |
enough of the theory chris tell us what you're actually going to do all right so i will here's the vision for ted number one do nothing this thing ain't broke so i ain't gonna fix it jeff kindly remarked to me chris ted is a really great conference you're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad
| 1 |
5,692 |
but it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages and the volume isn't there so anyway so we ended up making our own book scanner and with two digital high grade professional digital cameras controlled museum lighting so even if it's a black and white book you can go and get the proper intonation so you basically do a beautiful respectful job this is not a fax this is the idea is to do a beautiful job as you're going through these libraries and we've been able to achieve cents a page if we run things in volume this is what it looks like at the university of toronto and actually it turns out to you know pay a living wage people seem to love it yes it's a little boring but some people kind of get into the zen of it
| 1 |
5,693 |
we really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children if we don't do that we're going to get the generation we deserve they're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them and we as now the elite parents librarians professionals whatever it is a bunch of our activities are in fact in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us or as broadly as we can i'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone one is what's on the boston public library
| 0 |
5,694 |
a natural biological process that every girl and woman goes through every month for about half of her life a phenomenon that is so significant that the survival and propagation of our species depends on it yet we consider it a taboo we feel awkward and shameful talking about it when i got my first periods i was told to keep it a secret from others even from my father and brother later when this chapter appeared in our textbooks our biology teacher skipped the subject
| 1 |
5,697 |
so we decided to create a comic book where the cartoon characters would enact these stories and educate girls about menstruation in a fun and engaging way to represent girls in their different phases of puberty we have three characters who has not gotten her period yet who gets her period during the narrative of the book and mira who has already been getting her period there is a fourth character didi through her girls come to know about the various aspects of growing up and menstrual hygiene management while making the book we took great care that none of the illustrations were objectionable in any way and that it is culturally sensitive during our prototype testing we found that the girls loved the book they were keen on reading it and knowing more and more about periods on their own parents and teachers were comfortable in talking about periods to young girls using the book and sometimes even boys were interested in reading it
| 1 |
5,698 |
dream of a future where menstruation is not a curse not a disease but a welcoming change in a girl's life and i would and i would like to end this with a small request to all the parents here dear parents if you would be ashamed of periods your daughters would be too so please be period positive
| 1 |
5,700 |
you know what i learned from it i learned that it is really shameful to talk about it i learned to be ashamed of my body i learned to stay unaware of periods in order to stay decent research in various parts of india shows that three out of every girls are not aware of menstruation at the time of their first periods and in some parts of this number is as high as nine out of girls being unaware of it
| 0 |
5,701 |
i was one of them i grew up in a small town called in where even buying a sanitary napkin is considered shameful so when i started getting my periods i began with using rags
| 0 |
5,702 |
i grew up in a small town called in where even buying a sanitary napkin is considered shameful so when i started getting my periods i began with using rags after every use i would wash and reuse them but to store them i would hide and keep it in a dark damp place so that nobody finds out that i'm due to repeated washing the rags would become coarse and i would often get rashes and infections using them i wore these already for five years until i moved out of that town another issue that periods brought in my life those of the social restrictions that are imposed upon our girls and women when they're on their periods i think you all must be aware of it but i'll still list it for the few who don't i was not allowed to touch or eat pickles
| 0 |
5,703 |
i was not allowed to touch or eat pickles i was not allowed to sit on the sofa or some other family member's bed i had to wash my bed sheet after every period even if it was not stained i was considered impure and forbidden from worshipping or touching any object of religious importance you'll find signposts outside temples denying the entry of girls and women ironically most of the time it is the older woman who imposes such restrictions on younger girls in a family after all they have grown up accepting such restrictions as norms and in the absence of any intervention it is the myth and misconception that propagate from generation to generation
| 0 |
5,705 |
in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution and i think the answer is exchange the habit of exchanging one thing for another it's a unique human feature no other animal does it you can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange and indeed there's reciprocity in other animals but the exchange of one object for another never happens as adam smith said no man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog
| 1 |
5,706 |
how many other people tens hundreds thousands you know i think it's probably millions because you've got to include the man who grew the coffee which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig who was drilling for oil which was going to be made into the plastic etc they were all working for me to make a mouse for me and that's the way society works that's what we've achieved as a species in the old days if you were rich you literally had people working for you that's how you got to be rich you employed them louis had a lot of people working for him they made his silly outfits like this and they did his silly or whatever
| 1 |
5,707 |
now you do get other animals working for each other too ants are a classic example workers work for queens and queens work for workers but there's a big difference which is that it only happens within the colony there's no working for each other across the colonies and the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor that is to say they specialize with respect to reproduction the queen does it all in our species we don't like doing that it's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves is reproduction
| 1 |
5,709 |
these are both real objects one is an hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by homo
| 0 |
5,710 |
these are both real objects one is an hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by homo the other is obviously a computer mouse they're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree i've tried to work out which is bigger and it's almost impossible and that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand they're both technologies in the end their similarity is not that interesting it just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand
| 0 |
5,711 |
in the end their similarity is not that interesting it just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand the differences are what interest me because the one on the left was made to a pretty design for about a million years from one half million years ago to half a million years ago homo made the same tool for generations of course there were a few changes but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days there was no progress no innovation it's an extraordinary phenomenon but it's true whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years and there's another difference too which is the object on the left is made from one substance
| 0 |
5,714 |
he's got pneumonia and he looks like he needs intensive care his daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done which is a familiar phrase to us so i go down to the ward and see jim and his skin his translucent like this you can see his bones through the skin he's very very thin and he is indeed very sick with pneumonia and he's too sick to talk to me so i talk to his daughter kathleen and i say to her did you and jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation and she looked at me and said no of course not i thought okay take this steady and i got talking to her and after a while she said to me you know we always thought there'd be time jim was
| 1 |
5,716 |
what can i say that's positive what's positive is that this is happening at very great age now we are all most of us living to reach this point you know historically we didn't do that this is what happens to you when you live to be a great age and unfortunately increasing longevity does mean more old age not more youth i'm sorry to say that
| 1 |
5,717 |
the small idea is let's all of us engage more with this in the way that jason has illustrated why can't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this there are a couple of things you can do one of them is you can just ask this simple question this question never fails in the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself who would you like to speak for you that's a really important question to ask people because giving people the control over who that is produces an amazing outcome the second thing you can say is have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we've got a better idea of what it is we can do so that's the little idea the big idea i think is more political i think we have to get onto this i suggested we should have occupy death
| 1 |
5,719 |
no doubt that will piss you off and now let's see whether we can set you free i don't promise anything
| 0 |
5,723 |
there wasn't this dialogue going on that i imagined was happening so a group of us started doing survey work and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in newcastle in the newcastle area and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating one in a hundred and only one in of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill and i realized of course this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large now i work in acute care this is john hunter hospital
| 0 |
5,724 |
now i work in acute care this is john hunter hospital and i thought surely we do better than that so a colleague of mine from nursing called lisa shaw and i went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die and we didn't find a single record of any preference about goals treatments or outcomes from any of the sets of notes initiated by a doctor or by a patient so we started to realize that we had a problem and the problem is more serious because of this what we know is that obviously we are all going to die but how we die is actually really important obviously not just to us but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards how we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us and the stress created in families by dying is enormous and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you've got a choice and if that wasn't bad enough of course all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you in fact about one in of you at this point will die in intensive care
| 0 |
5,726 |
thank you so much everyone from ted and chris and amy in particular i cannot believe i'm here i have not slept in weeks neil and i were sitting there comparing how little we've slept in anticipation for this i've never been so nervous and i do this when i'm nervous i just realized
| 1 |
5,727 |
i would say well why don't you just work with them one and they would say well we have five classes of to students each this can lead up to students a day how can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one attention you'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers and so we started talking about this and at the same time i thought about this massive group of people i knew writers editors journalists graduate students assistant professors you name it all these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the english word i hope to have an interest in the english language but i'm not speaking it well right now
| 1 |
5,728 |
we did this mural that's a chris ware mural that basically explains the entire history of the printed word in mural form it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road so we rented this space and everything was great except the landlord said well the space is zoned for retail you have to come up with something you've gotta sell something you can't just have a tutoring center so we thought ha ha really and we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell but we did all the necessary research it used to be a weight room so there were rubber floors below acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights we took all that down and we found beautiful wooden floors whitewashed beams and it had the look while we were renovating this place somebody said you know it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship and we looked around and somebody else said well you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer
| 1 |
5,730 |
so there's no stigma they're all working next to each other it's all a creative endeavor they're seeing adults they're modeling their behavior these adults they're working in their field they can lean over ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other there's a lot of cross pollination the only problem especially for the adults working at who hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up was that there was just the one bathroom
| 1 |
5,733 |
but this is i just want to emphasize locally funded locally built all the designers all of the builders everybody was local all the time was pro bono i just came and visited and said yes you guys are doing great or whatever that was it you can see the time in all five boroughs of new york in the back
| 1 |
5,734 |
and then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to people at symphony space at a benefit for new york so he's there every day he's evangelical about it he brings his cousins in now there's four family members that come in every day so i'll go through really quickly this is l a the echo park time travel mart whenever you are we're already then
| 1 |
5,736 |
about i was living in brooklyn i was trying to finish my first book i was wandering around dazed every day because i wrote from a m to a m so i would walk around in a daze during the day i had no mental acuity to speak of during the day but i had flexible hours in the brooklyn neighborhood that i lived in park slope there are a lot of writers it's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people meanwhile i had grown up around a lot of teachers my mom was a teacher my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching
| 0 |
5,738 |
and so they had you know their time and their interest but at the same time there wasn't a conduit that i knew of in my community to bring these two communities together so when i moved back to san francisco we rented this building and the idea was to put quarterly that we published twice or three times a year and a few other magazines we were going to move it into an office for the first time it used to be in my kitchen in brooklyn
| 0 |
5,739 |
it used to be in my kitchen in brooklyn we were going to move it into an office and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center so we thought we'll have all these writers and editors and everybody sort of a writing community coming into the office every day anyway why don't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school get extra help on their written homework so you have basically no border between these two communities so the idea was that we would be working on whatever we're working on at p m the students flow in and you put down what you're doing or you trade or you work a little bit later or whatever it is you give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood so we had this place we rented it the landlord was all for it we did this mural that's a chris ware mural that basically explains the entire history of the printed word in mural form it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road so we rented this space
| 0 |
5,741 |
you see this is sort of a sketch i did on a napkin a great carpenter built all this stuff and you see we made it look sort of pirate supply like here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat we have the peg legs there that are all handmade and fitted to you up at the top you see the display which is the black column there for everyday use for your and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night special occasions bar and whatever so we opened this place and this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in this is replacement eyes in case you lose one these are some signs that we have all over the place practical joking with pirates
| 0 |
5,744 |
she took over as executive director immediately she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything and so suddenly it was actually full every day and what we were trying to offer every day was one attention the goal was to have a one ratio with every one of these students you know it's been proven that to hours a year with one attention a student can get one grade level higher
| 0 |
5,745 |
they come there many times their parents you can't see it but there's a church pew that i bought in a berkeley auction right there the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored so that was the basis of it was one attention and we found ourselves full every day with kids if you're on valencia street within those few blocks at around p m p m you will get run over often by the kids and their big backpacks or whatever actually running to this space which is very strange because it's school in a way but there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different
| 0 |
5,746 |
i grew up watching star trek i love star trek star trek made me want to see alien creatures creatures from a far distant world but basically i figured out that i could find those alien creatures right on earth and what i do is i study insects i'm obsessed with insects particularly insect flight i think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life without insects there'd be no flowering plants without flowering plants there would be no clever fruit eating primates giving ted talks
| 1 |
5,747 |
one of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the the are actually gyroscopes these devices beat back and forth about hertz during flight and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very very fast corrective maneuvers but all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain and yes indeed flies have a brain a brain of about neurons now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function and the basic punchline of my talk is i'd like to turn that over on its head i don't think they're a simple model of anything and i think that flies are a great model they're a great model for flies
| 1 |
5,748 |
let's explore this notion of simplicity so i think unfortunately a lot of we're all somewhat narcissistic when we think of brain we of course imagine our own brain but remember that this kind of brain which is much much smaller instead of billion neurons it has neurons but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for million years and is it fair to say that it's simple well it's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons but is that a fair metric and i would propose it's not a fair metric so let's sort of think about this i think we have to compare we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do
| 1 |
5,749 |
i realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly but let's take another animal just as an example here's a mouse a mouse has about times as many neurons as a fly i used to study mice when i studied mice i used to talk really slowly and then something happened when i started to work on flies
| 1 |
5,750 |
they hide from predators they do a lot of the similar things but i would argue that flies do more so for example i'm going to show you a sequence and i have to say some of my funding comes from the military so i'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room okay so i want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly watch it very closely and you'll see why my six son now wants to be a neuroscientist wait for it so at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice they're at least as clever as pigeons
| 1 |
5,751 |
and so i want to show you a high speed video sequence of a fly shot at frames per second in infrared lighting and to the right off screen is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly the fly is going to sense this predator it is going to extend its legs out it's going to away to live to fly another day now i have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye the fly has seen this looming predator estimated its position initiated a motor pattern to fly it away beating its wings at times a second as it does so
| 0 |
5,752 |
now flight what does it take to fly well in order to fly just as in a human aircraft you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight and you need a controller and in the first human aircraft the controller was basically the brain of orville and wilbur sitting in the cockpit now how does this compare to a fly well i spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air and you might have heard how engineers proved that couldn't fly well the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work
| 0 |
5,754 |
now what about the engine the engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating they have two types of flight muscle so called power muscle which is stretch activated which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction basis by the nervous system it's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight and it fills the middle portion of the fly so when a fly hits your windshield it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at but attached to the base of the wing is a set of little tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all but they're very fast and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke basis and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory and of course the role of the nervous system is to control all this so let's look at the controller now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem they have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection
| 0 |
5,755 |
now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem they have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection they have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet they have another set of eyes on the top of their head we have no idea what they do they have sensors on their wing their wing is covered with sensors including sensors that sense deformation of the wing they can even taste with their wings one of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the
| 0 |
5,756 |
we go from this view out to the stars so the earth is cool but what we really want to show are the spacecraft so i'm going to bring the interface back up and now you're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the earth these are a number of our science space earth orbiters we haven't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites if we did it would be a complete mess because there's a lot of stuff out there and the cool thing is we actually created models for a number of these spacecraft so if you want to visit any of these all you need to do is double click on them so i'm going to find the international space station double click and it will take us all the way down to the and now you're riding along with the where it is right now and the other cool thing is not only can we move the camera around we can also control time so i can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward and now we can see what a sunset on the would look like and they get one every minutes
| 1 |
5,759 |
earth goes from this view down to your backyard we go from this view out to the stars
| 0 |
5,764 |
so tom gave us a call and said do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the national theatre it seemed a lovely idea but it had to ride it had to have a rider it had to have a rider and it had to participate in cavalry charges
| 1 |
5,765 |
we started work on the prototype after the model was approved and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated we had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones and we had a crate built for it it had to be shipped to london we were going to test drive it on the street outside of our house in cape town and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet so we got a camera and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances and we sent it off to the national theatre hoping that they believed that we created something that worked
| 1 |
5,766 |
we opened the lid we took the horse out and it did work it walked and it was able to be ridden here i have an clip of the very first walk of the prototype this is in the national theatre studio the place where they cook new ideas it had by no means got the green light yet the choreographer toby sedgwick invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs grew up into the big horse and nick starr the director of the national theatre saw that particular moment he was standing next to me he nearly wet himself and so the show was given the green light and we went back to cape town and redesigned the horse completely here is the plan
| 1 |
5,767 |
but he also controls the head directly by using his hand the ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse when they point right back the horse is fearful or angry depending upon what's going on in front of him around him or when he's more relaxed the head comes down and the ears listen either side horses' hearing is very important it's almost more important than their eyesight over here tommy's got what you call the heart position he's working the leg you see the string tendon from the hyena the front leg automatically pulls the hoop up
| 1 |
5,769 |
well actually i prefer to say that it's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life okay so it has ears that move passively when the head goes and it has these bulkheads made out of plywood covered with fabric curiously similar in fact to the plywood canoes that father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop in port elizabeth the village outside port elizabeth in south africa his mother was a puppeteer
| 0 |
5,771 |
here again you see the same structure the bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane but it's ultimately the same structure it's got two people inside it on stilts which give them the height and somebody in the front who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head the person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail a bit like the hyena same mechanism just a bit bigger and he's controlling the ear movement so this production was seen by tom morris of the national theatre in london
| 0 |
5,772 |
but they agreed to go along with it for a while so we began with a test this is adrian and stander who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse and our next door neighbor katherine riding on a ladder the weight is really difficult when it's up above your head and once we put katherine through that particular brand of hell we knew that we might be able to make a horse which could be ridden so we made a model
| 0 |
5,773 |
a month later we were there in london with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us about people we were terrified we opened the lid we took the horse out and it did work it walked and it was able to be ridden here i have an clip of the very first walk of the prototype this is in the national theatre studio the place where they cook new ideas
| 0 |
5,774 |
well there was a little piece of that women's health initiative that went to national heart lung and blood institute which is the cardiology part of the and we got to do the wise study and the wise stands for women's ischemia syndrome evaluation and i have chaired this study for the last years it was a study to specifically ask what's going on with women why are more and more women dying of heart disease so in the wise years ago we started out and said well wow there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that and our colleagues in washington d c had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die compared to men who have heart attacks and die and again this is millions of people happening every day women in their fatty plaque and this is their coronary artery so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle women erode men explode you're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology
| 1 |
5,775 |
and so the yellow is the fatty plaque and panel a is a man and you can see it's lumpy bumpy he's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries panel b is the woman very smooth she's just laid it down nice and tidy
| 1 |
5,777 |
so this is the leading killer of women it's a closely held secret for reasons i don't know in addition to making this personal so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart we're going to wax into the politics because the personal as you know is political and not enough is being done about this
| 0 |
5,778 |
since more women die in the u s than men so where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily which that was never true but that was kind of how everybody thought in the and and it was in all the textbooks it's certainly what i learned when i was training if we were to remain sexist and that was not right but if we were going to go forward and be sexist it's actually a woman's disease so it's a woman's disease now and one of the things that you see is that male line the mortality is going down down down down down
| 0 |
5,779 |
one of the things that you see is that male line the mortality is going down down down down down and you see the female line since the gap is widening more and more women two three four times more women dying of heart disease than men and that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change so what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies which had been developed in men by men for men for the last years and they work pretty well in men don't they weren't working so well for women so that was a big wake up call in the heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer
| 0 |
5,780 |
traditional prescriptions for growth in africa are not working very well after one trillion dollars in african development related aid in the last years real per capita income today is lower than it was in the aid is not doing too well in response the bretton woods institutions the and the world bank pushed for free trade not aid yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth the newly prescribed silver bullet is we seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in africa is an entrepreneur
| 1 |
5,781 |
consider these two alternative scenarios one you loan dollars to each of banana farmers allowing them to dry their surplus bananas and fetch percent more revenue at the local market or two you give dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields percent additional income to all banana farmers and creates additional jobs we invested in the second scenario and backed old kenyan entrepreneur eric to set up an agro processing factory called to produce gluten free banana based flour and baby food is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers who have an ownership in the business our dream is to take an eric and try to help him become a mo ibrahim which requires skill financing local and global partnerships and extraordinary perseverance but why pan african the scramble for africa during the berlin conference of where quite frankly we africans were not exactly consulted resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations liberia four million cape verde
| 1 |
5,782 |
my solution forget micro entrepreneurs let's invest in building pan african titans like sudanese businessman mo ibrahim mo took a contrarian bet on africa when he founded international in and built it into a mobile cellular provider with million subscribers across african countries by the mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge sharing perhaps we are not at a stage in africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition consider these two alternative scenarios
| 0 |
5,783 |
the pan african opportunities outweigh the challenges and that's why we're expanding markets from just kenya to algeria nigeria ghana and anywhere else that will buy our food we hope to help solve food security empower farmers create jobs develop the local economy and we hope to become rich in the process while it's not the sexiest approach and maybe it doesn't achieve the same feel good as giving a woman dollars to buy a goat on org perhaps supporting fewer higher impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan africa can help change this the political freedom for which our fought is meaningless without economic freedom we hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world class businesses creating indigenous wealth providing jobs that we so desperately need and hopefully helping achieve this
| 0 |
5,787 |
but now three years later here's where we stand it's a vibrant global community of and this is just the beginning these are some of the biggest ones and there are others opening every day there's one probably going to open up in moscow one in south korea and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of let me take you on a little tour work alone we work in groups in big cities and in small villages
| 1 |
5,788 |
i've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk i signed up for something called the personal genome project it's a study at harvard where at the end of the study they're going to take my entire sequence all of my medical information and my identity and they're going to post it online for everyone to see there were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion the one i liked the best is someone could download my sequence go back to the lab synthesize some fake ellen and plant it at a crime scene
| 1 |
5,791 |
we hack hardware software and of course the code of life we like to build things then we like to take things apart we make things grow
| 0 |
5,793 |
regulations we dispose of our waste properly we follow safety procedures we don't work with pathogens you know if you're working with a pathogen you're not part of the community you're part of the community i'm sorry and sometimes people ask me well what about an accident well working with the safe organisms that we normally work with the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating like some sort of that's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the sahara desert now it could happen but i'm not going to plan my life around it
| 0 |
5,798 |
it turns out of all of those million species life only needs three things on one side all life on earth needs energy complex life like us derives our energy from the sun but life deep underground can get its energy from things like chemical reactions there are a number of different energy sources available on all planets on the other side all life needs food or nourishment and this seems like a tall order especially if you want a succulent tomato
| 1 |
5,799 |
however all life on earth derives its nourishment from only six chemical elements and these elements can be found on any planetary body in our solar system so that leaves the thing in the middle as the tall pole the thing that's hardest to achieve not moose but water
| 1 |
5,804 |
i would like to talk for just a minute or two about magnetic fields earth has one venus and mars do not magnetic fields are generated in the deep interior of a planet by electrically conducting churning fluid material that creates this big old magnetic field that surrounds earth if you have a compass you know which way north is venus and mars don't have that if you have a compass on venus and mars congratulations you're lost
| 1 |
5,806 |
so that leaves a few bodies that we should think about so let's make the problem simpler for ourselves let's think only about liquid water on the surface of a planet there are only three bodies to think about in our solar system with regard to liquid water on the surface of a planet and in order of distance from the sun it's venus earth and mars you want to have an atmosphere for water to be liquid you have to be very careful with that atmosphere you can't have too much atmosphere too thick or too warm an atmosphere because then you end up too hot like venus and you can't have liquid water but if you have too little atmosphere and it's too thin and too cold you end up like mars too cold so venus is too hot mars is too cold and earth is just right
| 0 |
5,808 |
number one if mama bear's bowl is too cold when goldilocks walks into the room does that mean it's always been too cold or could it have been just right at some other time when goldilocks walks into the room determines the answer that we get in the story and the same is true with planets they're not static things they change they vary they evolve and do the same so let me give you an example here's one of my favorite pictures of mars
| 0 |
5,811 |
the sails may gather energy from the solar wind the magnetic field may gather energy from the solar wind that allows even more atmospheric escape to happen
| 0 |
5,812 |
the sails may gather energy from the solar wind the magnetic field may gather energy from the solar wind that allows even more atmospheric escape to happen it's an idea that has to be tested but the effect and how it works seems apparent that's because we know energy from the solar wind is being deposited into our atmosphere here on earth that energy is conducted along magnetic field lines down into the polar regions resulting in incredibly beautiful aurora if you've ever experienced them it's magnificent we know the energy is getting in we're trying to measure how many particles are getting out and if the magnetic field is influencing this in any way so i've posed a problem for you here but i don't have a solution yet
| 0 |
5,814 |
i'd like to invite you to close your eyes imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home i'd like you to notice the color of the door the material that it's made out of now visualize a pack of overweight on bicycles
| 1 |
5,815 |
open your eyes i want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in new york city it's called the united states memory championship and i had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist expecting i guess that this was going to be like the superbowl of savants this was a bunch of guys and a few ladies widely varying in both age and upkeep
| 1 |
5,816 |
we were standing outside the competition hall and ed who is a wonderful brilliant but somewhat eccentric english guy says to me josh you're an american journalist do you know spears i'm like what no why because i really want to teach spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on u s national television it will prove to the world that anybody can do this
| 1 |
5,817 |
i met a host of really interesting people this is a guy called e p he's an who had very possibly the worst memory in the world his memory was so bad that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem which is amazing and he was this incredibly tragic figure but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are at the other end of the spectrum i met this guy this is kim peek he was the basis for dustin hoffman's character in the movie rain man we spent an afternoon together in the salt lake city public library memorizing phone books which was
| 1 |
5,818 |
was however one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to when they put these guys in an machine scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else of note they were using or they seemed to be using a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation why and is there something that the rest of us can learn from this the sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly and then the rest of the field has to play catch up this is my friend ben pridmore three time world memory champion on his desk in front of him are shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered he used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of random binary digits in half an hour
| 1 |
5,819 |
what figured out at that moment is something that i think we all kind of intuitively know which is that as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word instructions from our colleagues we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories if i asked you to recount the first words of the story that i just told you about chances are you would have a tough time with it but i would wager that if i asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now you would be able to see that the idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember the crazier weirder more bizarre funnier the image is the more unforgettable it's likely to be this is advice that goes back years to the earliest latin memory treatises so how does this work let's say that you've been invited to ted center stage to give a speech and you want to do it from memory and you want to do it the way that cicero would have done it if he had been invited to years ago
| 1 |
5,820 |
what you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house and you'd come up with some sort of crazy ridiculous unforgettable image to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest
| 1 |
5,821 |
this is how roman orators memorized their speeches not word which is just going to screw you up but topic in fact the phrase topic sentence that comes from the greek word which means place that's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms the phrase in the first place that's like in the first place of your memory palace i thought this was just fascinating and i got really into it and i went to a few more of these memory contests and i had this notion that i might write something longer about this subculture of competitive but there was a problem the problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event
| 1 |
5,822 |
and i realized if i was going to tell this story i needed to walk in their shoes a little bit and so i started trying to spend or minutes every morning before i sat down with my new york times just trying to remember something maybe it was a poem maybe it was names from an old yearbook that i bought at a flea market and i found that this was shockingly fun i never would have expected that it was fun because this is actually not about training your memory what you're doing is you're trying to get better and better at creating at dreaming up these utterly ludicrous raunchy hilarious and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye and i got pretty into it this is me wearing my standard competitive training kit
| 1 |
5,824 |
bicycles fly everywhere wheels roll past you spokes end up in awkward places step over the threshold of your door into your foyer your hallway whatever's on the other side and appreciate the quality of the light
| 0 |
5,825 |
bicycles fly everywhere wheels roll past you spokes end up in awkward places step over the threshold of your door into your foyer your hallway whatever's on the other side and appreciate the quality of the light the light is shining down on cookie monster cookie monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse it's a talking horse you can practically feel his blue fur your nose you can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth walk past him walk past him into your living room
| 0 |
5,826 |
i was like this is unbelievable these people must be freaks of nature
| 0 |
5,827 |
everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory we've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques techniques invented years ago in greece the same techniques that cicero had used to memorize his speeches that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books
| 0 |
5,828 |
i was like well i'm not spears but maybe you could teach me i mean you've got to start somewhere right and that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me i ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory but also investigating it trying to understand how it works why it sometimes doesn't work and what its potential might be and i met a host of really interesting people this is a guy called e
| 0 |
5,829 |
over the last few we've invented a series of technologies from the alphabet to the scroll to the the printing press photography the computer the that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to our memories for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity these technologies have made our modern world possible but they've also changed us
| 0 |
5,832 |
it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the paradox which goes like this if i tell two people to remember the same word if i say to you remember that there is a guy named baker that's his name and i say to you remember that there is a guy who is a baker okay and i come back to you at some point later on and i say do you remember that word that i told you a while back do you remember what it was the person who was told his name is baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker same word different amount of remembering that's weird what's going on here well the name baker doesn't actually mean anything to you it is entirely from all of the other memories floating around in your skull
| 0 |
5,833 |
well the name baker doesn't actually mean anything to you it is entirely from all of the other memories floating around in your skull but the common noun baker we know bakers bakers wear funny white hats bakers have flour on their hands bakers smell good when they come home from work maybe we even know a baker and when we first hear that word we start putting these hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date the entire art of what is going on in these memory contests and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life is figuring out ways to transform capital b bakers into lower case b bakers to take information that is lacking in context in significance in meaning and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind
| 0 |
5,839 |
i walked all the way up to port townsend washington where i built a wooden boat rode it across puget sound and walked across washington to idaho and down to missoula montana i had written the university of montana two years earlier and said i'd like to go to school there i said i'd be there in about two years
| 1 |
5,840 |
and what were going to do is were going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class going to save your grade and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money then you can register for that class and give you the grade wow they do that in graduate schools i think but i use that story because they really wanted to help me they saw that i was really interested in the environment and they really wanted to help me along the way and during that time i actually taught classes without speaking i had students when i first walked into the class i explained with a friend who could interpret my sign language that i was john francis i was walking around the world i talk and this was the last time this persons going to be here interpreting for me all the students sat around and they went
| 1 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.